Monitoring systems for exercise equipment, such as stationary bicycles, treadmills, elliptical machines and the like, are known to measure, track and display the progress of a users exercise routine. Monitoring may be performed, for example, by a user at a machine via a local display which may be either embedded in the exercise equipment or provided nearby, in order for the user to track their progress during a workout with exercise metrics, e.g. calories burned, watts generated, floors climbed, distance traversed, etc., linked to their workout. Additionally, users may be given the ability to store their metrics from a workout session. This is advantageous for the user as it provides the ability to track progress over time. If a user, for example, monitors and stores the metric of “average speed” or “distance” on a exercise bike, they may gain valuable feedback on their progress over many sessions. Likewise a fitness/health club facility may wish to track individual or groups of users in order to collect usage and training information, which can be used by the facility to, for example, ascertain popular machines and help encourage and increase the results of their uses.
To facilitate monitoring the status or progress of users of exercise equipment and their metrics, the exercise equipment may provide access to the usage data via a communications protocol, such as C-SAFE or ANT+, which are known in the art. The use of these protocols allow a monitoring system connected to the exercise equipment to access usage data, often for re-presentation to a user via a display device.
Monitoring systems, which include exercise systems that track and store both equipment use and user workout data in a data storage network, are available. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,991,586 which discloses a system which captures data from multiple sources, such as exercise equipment, and stores it on a computer server for permanent storage or interactive analysis of the data combined with entertainment system data. It allows a user to integrate data from a personal monitoring device, such as a heart-rate device, as well as data from exercise equipment and display the data for a user. Unfortunately, if a user wishes to monitor the status of their exercise session, they are limited to doing so via the provided viewing screen. As a result users are limited from customization and further interaction with the data as they exercise which may enhance their overall experiences with the exercise sessions. Accordingly there is a need to provide an exercise usage monitoring system that improves the convenience and enhances a users workout experience, as well as optimizes the equipment owner's resources and experiences.